Snakes in my (insert the well-known potty mouth words here) back yard!

Geckos are cool. So are skinks.

 

If roaches freak you out (like they do me) never venture to South Carolina. They have what they call "Palmetto bugs" which I think are some sort of beetle. They're as big as the palm of your hand, and quick as hell. Those bastards creeped me out.

 

I'm with ya. I had family down there so I've been a couple times. Living with lizards (or whatever the fuck they are) is not my cup-o-tea.

I'll add that I hate snakes, spiders, mice, and rats. about the only animals I CAN stand are cats and dogs.

 

We have those in Texas, but we call them tree roaches. They're anywhere from two to four inches long and cause me to shriek, jump on chairs and call my dad like the girly girl I am.

They're solitary and live outside but like to wander inside when it rains. They like to wedge themselves beneath your door to hide from the water then drop inside your house when you open the door.

I had about five in my apartment my senior year of college. I hate them so very, very much.

However, I hate killing things. I'd be a great Buddhist. So my solution was to get them to crawl on the end of my broom them dump them outside since they're impossible to catch in a cup. It just lead to many chases around my apartment where it was unclear if I was cornering it or it was cornering me.

God, I'm going to have nightmares about those tonight.

 

None of these critters bother.
I don't like roaches. Nobody does.
But they don't throw me into a panic.
Although the idea of a roach crawling into someone's ear and getting stuck is pretty nasty.

 

About 10 years ago, there was a guy who lived just outside of Boston who owned an Egyptian cobra. One afternoon it was sunning itself in the guy's backyard and it got away. Six months later, it was found in an elementary school when a kid went to get his lunch bag. Luckily nobody was hurt.
Starman, where were you and your brand of justice when we needed you?

 

About roaches crawling into people's ears:


... You may think this is some kind of deranged myth. Uh-uh. Happens all the time. In fact, a controversy has raged since 1980 over the best way to get the little bastards out. The conventional remedy: drown the critter with mineral oil. "One cannot use the commercially available roach sprays," one MD sagely notes, "because of technical difficulty and for possible medicolegal reasons"--i.e., the patient might sue. But mineral oil isn't ideal either, because the insect takes a while to go through its death throes in the patient's ear.

One proposed alternative is 2-percent lidocaine anesthetic. The value of this was seemingly demonstrated when a patient showed up at a hospital with cockroaches in both ears. (Unanswered question: what was this guy doing?) Recognizing a golden opportunity for a controlled clinical trial, the attending physicians put mineral oil in one ear. "The cockroach succumbed after a valiant but futile struggle, but its removal required much dexterity on the part of the house officer," they wrote. In the other ear the doctors put lidocaine. "The roach exited the canal at a convulsive rate of speed" and was promptly stomped by an intern.

But lidocaine has drawbacks too. Another doctor who tried it reported that (1) the roach died in situ and was hell to get out, and (2) the roach had punctured the eardrum, so the lidocaine penetrated the inner ear and the patient had the whirlies for the next five hours. Also, subsequent tests have shown that lidocaine works much more slowly than your top-quality mineral oil.

Promising alternative: suction. Of course, one must take care not to inadvertently seal the ear canal with the suction tip, thereby risking "tympanic membrane barotrauma" and, for all I know, possibly sucking out the patient's brains.

What else? How about fly larvae in the ear? Happens. Also earwigs, with those scary pincers. You know the story. Earwig gets into a guy's ear, chews through his brain, causes horrible agony. Finally it stops. The doctors say, good news: the earwig came out the other side! Bad news: it was female and laid eggs. You've also heard that this is BS, that earwigs don't really crawl into ears. Not so; two known cases. The part about eating out your brains may still be a myth, but who knows?

 

I'd forgotten about this until Smallpotatoes weighed in, but my first newspaper job, a southern weekly newspaper, we had pictures of a dead anaconda that was found out in the woods outside of town. That thing was huge, like 24 feet or something, and it was as thick as a telephone pole. And a couple of weeks later someone bought an old downtown retail space that was at one time a sewing shopt. It had one of those old pedal-operated machines, and the new owner thought he'd try it out to see if it still worked. He pumped the pedal a couple of times and a 10-foot python came crawling out of it.

No truth to the rumor the guy's next words were "Snakes! We got snakes in the mother fucking sewing machine!"

 

Claim: The average person swallows eight spiders per year.

Status: False.

Origins: Oh, yuk!
It's hard enough to avoid those horrible wriggly things while we're awake, and now we have to worry that they're crawling into our mouths while we sleep? Little Miss Muffett was a piker.

Fear not. This "statistic" was not only made up out of whole cloth, it was invented as an example of the absurd things people will believe simply because they come across them on the Internet.

http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.htm

 

They're a variety of cockroach, and they release a particularly ... ah, pungent smell when frightened. :-\